The problem with 3D movies has been twofold – setting up shots that properly take advantage of the 3D effect, and technically executing them. CGI is good for this because it lets you do both much more easily than Real Life, and it’s easier to fix if it doesn’t work out well.
I persoinally think that 3D ought to be a great addition to cinema, and can, in principle, really add something to scenes – even non-action-adventure ones. In my opinion, the greatest 3D scene so far has been the “murder” scene in Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder.
The best overall 3D movie was The Creature from the Black Lagoon. That film had naturally-occurring perfect “3D moments” – situations where you had a lot of relatively close by things with plenty of parallax so that you saw the 3D effect. That happened because a lot of scenes were shot underwater in very clear water, so you could see the different planes formed by bubbles, floating sediment, plants, and the occasional Creature.
Bad 3D happens when things are so far away that there’s no parallax (so no 3D) or when the 3D is all gimmickry – like the “paddleball” sequence in House of Wax, or virtually the entire movie Comin’ at You.
I thought the Robert Zemeckis films Beowulf , Polar Express and A Christmas Carol did good things with 3D (and on other counts as well). I could easily see serious movies using 3D to good advantage – Imagine scenes like the stone tunnel at the end of The Third Man in 3D. Or the raid on Aqaba in Lawrence of Arabia. And, as far as action-adventure goes, Star Wars would’ve been great in 3D – the jump to lightspeed, Princess Leia’s hologram really being 3D, the Death Star Trench sequence, and the final explosion.
Incidentally, red/green anaglyph isn’t “old style” 3D. Those 1950s movies were released in Polaroid format in their initial release in the Big Cities, and the color films in 3D looked a lot better in it. They only released them in anaglyphic format later because it didn’t require special equipment for projection or a special polarization-retaining screen – you could just project the anaglyphic film with an ordinary projector, use an ordinary screen, and simply hand out red-and-green glasses. It worked really well with nominally black and white movies like It Came from Outer Space, and even pretty well with color films (although the color got a little weird).